Like the preceding, chapter 9 shows us the Lord rejected—here in His work, as there in His word. The difference a little answers to what we have seen in chapters 5-6. In the fifth chapter He is the quickening Son of God; but all testimonies are vain, and judgment awaits the unbeliever—a resurrection of judgment. In chapter 6 He is seen as the suffering Son of man, who takes the place of humiliation, instead of the kingdom which they wanted to force on Him. But no; this was not the purpose for which He had come, though true in its own time; but what He took, and took because His eye was ever single, viewed as man, was for God’s glory, not for His own; and the real glory of God in a ruined world is only met by the service and death of the Son of man dying for sinners and for sin. Somewhat similarly in chapter 8, He is the rejected Word, who confesses Himself (when most scorned and men are ready to stone Him) to be the everlasting God Himself. As man becomes more hardened in unbelief, Christ becomes more pointed and plain in the assertion of the truth. Thus the more it is pressed down, the more the brightness of the truth makes its way out, that He is God. They had fully heard now who He was, and therefore must He be ignominiously cast out. His words brought God too close, too really; and they would not bear them.
But now He is rejected in another way, and in this it is as man, though declaring Himself and worshipped as Son of God. We shall see that there is stress on His manhood, more especially as the necessary mold or form which divine grace took to effect the blessing of man, to work the works of God in grace on the earth. Accordingly, here it is not merely that man is seen to be guilty, but blind from his birth. Doubtless there is light that discovers man in his evil and unbelief; but man is sought and met by His grace; for here the man had no thought of being healed—never asked Jesus to heal him. There was no cry here to the Son of David. This we hear most properly in the other Gospels, which develop the last offer of the Messiah to the Jews. In every one of the Gospels, indeed, we have Him finally presented as the Son of David; and therefore, although it be the proper province of Matthew, yet inasmuch as all the synoptic Gospels dwell on our Lord at the close as Son of David, all the Gospels give the story of the blind man at Jericho. Matthew, however, gives blind men over and over again, crying to Him, “Son of David.” The reason is, I suppose, that not merely is He so presented at the last, but all through in Matthew. In John this case does not appear at all; no blind man cries to the Son of David throughout. What is brought before us in the man, blind from his birth, is a wholly different truth. It was, indeed, the most desperate case. Instead of the man looking to Christ, it is Christ that looks at the man, without a single cry or appeal to Him. It is absolute grace. If it be not the Father seeking, at any rate it is the Son. It is One who had deigned to become man in love to man. He is seeking, though rejected, to display the grace of God toward this poor blind beggar in his abject need: “As Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?”
They had nothing better than Jewish thoughts about the case. But all through the Gospel of John Christ is setting aside these thoughts on every side, whether in enquirers outside, or more particularly in disciples, who were under this pernicious influence like other people. Here the Lord answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents.” The ways of God are not as man’s; and their revelation stands in contrast with Jewish notions of retributive justice. The reason lay deeper than what his parents deserved, or the foresight of what he would do amiss. Not that the man and his parents were not sinners; but the eye of Jesus saw beyond nature, or law, or government, in the man’s blindness from his birth. To divine goodness, the inner and true and ultimate reason, God’s reason—if one may be permitted such a phrase—was to furnish an opportunity for Christ to work the works of God on the earth. How blessedly grace operates in, and judges of a hopeless case That it was wholly outside the resources of man made it just the occasion for Jesus, for the works of God. This is the point of the chapter —Jesus working the works of God in free unconditional grace. In chapter 8 the prominent feature is the word of God; here, the works of God made effectual and manifest in grace. “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day.” Therefore can one say, that it is unqualified grace, because it is not merely God mercifully answering man’s appeal, and blessing man’s work, but God sending, and Christ working. “I must work the works of him that sent me.” What grace (save in Jesus all through) can be compared with this? Jesus, then, was doing this work “while it is day.” Day was while He was present with them. Night was coming, which would be for the Jew, the personal absence of the Messiah; indeed, such for any would be the departure of the Son of God. “The night cometh, when no man can work” (vs. 4). Higher things might follow in their season, and brighter light suited to them when the day should dawn, and the day-star arise in hearts established with grace. But here it is the time of the absence of Jesus in contrast with His presence on earth as He then was. “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (vs. 5).
This establishes very plainly the fact, that these two chapters are so far linked together, in that they look at Christ as light, and the light of the world too. But, far from being confined to Israel, it rather sets aside the Jewish system, which assumes to order things justly now according to man’s conduct, thus ignoring man’s ruin by sin, and God’s grace in Christ as the sole deliverance. Here it is not so much the light by the word convicting man, and bringing out God’s nature and the reality of His own personal glory, but “the light of the world” (vs. 5) as manifesting God graciously working in power contrary to nature. It was a question not of light for eyes, but of giving power to see the light to one wholly and evidently incapable of seeing as he was. Hence we do well to remark the peculiarity in the Lord’s manner of working. He lays clay upon the man’s eyes; an extraordinary step at first sight. In truth, it was the shadow of Himself become man, an apt figure of the human body which He took in order therein to do God’s will. He was not simply Son of God, but Son of God possessed of a body prepared of God (Heb. 10). He became man; and yet the fact of the body of Christ—of God’s Son being found in fashion as a man—only and greatly increases the difficulty at first sight, because nobody, apart from the word of God, would look for a divine person in such a guise. But when faith bows to the word, and accepts the will of God in it, how precious the grace, how wise the ordering, yea, how indispensable it is learned to be! So with the man already blind before. Putting the plaster of clay over his eyes did not at once mend his blindness in the least; but, if anything, the contrary—would have hindered his seeing, had he seen before. But when he goes at the word of Jesus, and washes in the pool of Siloam—that is, when the word is applied in the Holy Spirit to his case, revealing Jesus as the sent One of God (compare John 5:2424Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. (John 5:24)), all was so far plain. It was not a mere man who had spoken; he apprehended in Jesus One Sent (for the pool to which the Lord directed the man to wash his clay-covered eyes in was called “Siloam;” that is, it bore the very name of “sent”). It was then understood that Jesus had a mission on earth to work the works of God. Though, of course, man born of a woman, He was more than human: He was the Sent One—the Sent of the Father in love into this world, to work effectually where man was entirely incapable even of helping in any way.
Thus the truth was in process of application, so to speak. The man goes his way, washes, and comes seeing. The word of God explains this mystery. The Son’s taking humanity is ever a blinding fact to nature; but he who is not disobedient to the word will assuredly not fail to find in the acknowledgment of the truth Christ’s glory under His manhood, as well as the need of his own soul met with a power and promptness which answers, as it is due, to His glory who wrought in grace here below.
Nevertheless, the word of the Lord tried him as ever; other hearts were tested by it too. The neighbors were astonished, and questions arise; the Pharisees are stirred but divided (for this miracle, also, was wrought on a sabbath). The parents being summoned, as well as himself questioned, all stand to the great and indisputable fact: the man just healed was their child, and he had been born blind. The man indeed witnessed what he believed of Jesus, and the threat of the consequences was only made the clearer, even though there was a total avoidance of all dangerous answers on the parents’ part, and a determination to reject Christ and those who confessed Him in the Pharisees. The work of grace was hated, and especially because it was wrought on the sabbath day. For this bore solemn witness, that in the truth of things before God there was no sabbath possible for them: He must work if man was to be delivered and blessed. Of course, there was the holy form, and there was no doubt as to the duty; but if God revealed Himself on earth, neither forms nor duties, paid after a sort by sinful men, could hide the awful reality that man was incapable of keeping such a sabbath as God could recognize. The day had been sanctified from the beginning; the duty of the Jew was unquestionable; but sin was man’s state; —after every remedial measure, he was thoroughly and only evil continually.
In fact, so far the Jew quite understood, as far as that went, the moral meaning of the Lord’s working thus both on the impotent man before, and now on the blind man. For such deeds on the sabbath did pronounce sentence of death on that whole system, and on the great badge of relationship between God and Israel. If Jesus was true God as well as man, if He was really the light of the world, yet wrought on the sabbath day, there was plain evidence on God’s part of what He thought of Israel. They felt it to be a matter of life and death. But the man was led on by these conscienceless attacks, as is always the case where there is simple faith. The effort to destroy the person of Christ and to undermine His glory only developed, in the goodness of God, that divine work which had already touched his soul, as well as given him eyes to see. Thus was his faith exercised and cleared, side by side with the unbelief arid hostility of the enemies of Christ. The consequence is, that we have a beautiful history in this chapter of the man led on step by step; first owning the work the Lord had wrought with simplicity, and therefore in force of truth: what he does not know he owned with just the same frankness. Then, when the Pharisees were divided, and he was appealed to once more, “He is a prophet” was his distinct answer. Then, when the fact was only the more established by the parents, spite of their timidity, the hypocritical effort to honor God at the expense of Jesus draws out the most withering refutation (not without a taunt) from him who had been blind (vss. 24-33). This closed, they could not answer, and cast him out (vs. 34).
How beautiful to mark the Spirit’s love, dwelling fully and minutely on a blind beggar taught of God, thus gradually and evermore beating their incredulous objections smaller than when they cast him out as dirt in the streets! What a living picture of the new witness for Christ! A character plain, honest, energetic, not always the most gracious, but certainly confronted with the most heartless and false of adversaries. But if the man finds himself out of the synagogue, he is soon in the presence of Christ. The religious world of that day could not endure a witness of divine power and grace which they themselves, feeling not the need, denied, denounced, and did all they could to destroy. Outside them, but with Jesus, he learns more deeply than ever, so as to fill his soul with profound joy and gladness, that the wondrous healer of his blindness was not merely a prophet, but the Son of God—just object of faith and worship. Thus clearly we have in this case the rejection of Jesus viewed, not in open attack on His own person, as in the chapter before, where they took up stones to stone Him, but here rather in His friends, whom He had first met in sovereign grace, and did not let them go till fully blessed, ending in Jesus worshipped
outside the synagogue as the Son of God (vss. 38-40).
Then the Lord declares the issues of His coming. “For judgment,” He says, “I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.” In this Gospel He had said before, that it was to save and give life, not to judge, that He came. Such was the aim of His heart, at all cost to Himself; but the effect was moral in one way or the other, and this now. Manifest judgment awaits the evil by and by. “And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words, and said unto him, Are we blind also? Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.” They were offended at the notion of their not seeing. Did they insist that they saw? The Lord admits the plea. If they felt their sin and shortcoming there might be a hope. As it was, then, sin remained. The boast, like the excuse, of unbelief is invariably the ground of divine judgment.